Embodiments herein generally relate to electrostatographic printers and copiers or reproduction machines, and more particularly, concerns a vacuum manifold that includes transport belt openings that are sized, shaped, and positioned to allow the transport belt to pass through the vacuum manifold.
One condition that can occur within devices that utilize belts to transport items, such as sheets of media, is that the belts can be undesirably heated by adjacent objects, such as fuser assemblies and other similar heat generating devices. When the media transport belts within printers and copiers become excessively hot, the transport belt can melt or disturb the image (especially duplex images) on the media being transported by the belt. Belts within printers (such as transfer or transport belts) can be cooled using thermally cooled rollers (for example U.S. Patent Publication Numbers 2002/0176723 and 2004/0265025) the complete disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
For example, U.S. Patent Application No. 2004/0265025 explains that vacuum sheet transports can be desirable for certain paper paths of various xerographic printers and other sheet transporting applications, especially in high speed printers. For example, for providing the upstream and/or downstream sheet transports of the print media sheets to and from a thermal fuser in which xerographic toner images on the print media are fused onto the printed sheets. These sheet transports are typically known vacuum belt transports with spaced and/or apertured belts. However, it has been discovered that such sheet transports, especially when heated by thermal emissions from other components of the printer, such as the fuser, can impart visible defects in areas of the printed images in some cases.
Conventional systems also utilize vacuum manifolds to clean debris from belts within photocopiers and printers. For example, U.S. Patent Publication 2006/0104678 (the complete disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference) discloses a vacuum manifold containing internal rotating brushes that are used to clean transfer belts in photocopiers.